[SOLVED] Broken /var HDD. How to recover?

The disk that holds my /var partition (and /home) went fishing and I had it replaced. The problem is that I cannot bring my arch installation back to life.

What I have:

A copy if my /var partition on a ntfs external hdd (made with cp -r).

Pretty much nothing from my home (everything I need is somewhere else, so no big deal, just getting the system to work is enough).

A new HDD.

What I've done:

Partition the new HDD the same way I did the old one - /var and /home on it (/ is on a different hdd, it has not been changed).

Copy everything I've backed up back to /var (probably with completely wrong permissions).

Edit to /etc/fstab to change the UUIDs.

Result:

The system goes through grub2, loads the kernel and errors out with a message that it cannot find a hdd (by listing it by UUID) with the UUID of the / (root) hard drive (the one that's not changed in any way) and drops me into a [rootfs /] prompt that even doesn't have fdisk in it.